{per aspera ad astra.}

12 quarters flew by and now I’m older (but still not 21, ha), arguably wiser, and at the very least blessed with better eyebrows. I didn’t realize this until physically leaving, but I spent a lot of my time at Stanford in a tunnel looking nowhere but straight ahead, not seeing past the shoulder-width walls, and thinking the light at the end was where I needed to be. Even in the last week before graduation, I was so conflicted and confused about what I wanted to do with my degree/skills/life. I felt a deep sense of inadequacy, ringed by both anxiety and admiration, from all of my peers’ incredible plans to make their mark on the world. The people waddling directly ahead of and behind me on that stage on Sunday are future genomics researchers, CEOs, global health advocates, math professors, and presidents. Unlike when I made a similarly ambitious statement at my high school graduation and it was a lofty cliche, I legitimately believe this. I saw with my own eyes how hard my classmates worked and what they managed to achieve in the short span of 4 out of their barely-ripe 22 years. It’s a big fucking deal.

So what about me? I’m returning to Stanford next fall to finish my master’s in computer science, which I’m conferring in the spring. I’ve been telling people it’s an extra 12-month procrastination tactic (which is true), although I didn’t really come to terms with myself about what exactly I’m even procrastinating. It’s not making a decision between n possible options, because that would be doable and discussable. What I really struggled to do this whole year was to be honest with myself about the difference between what I’m passionate about, what I like the idea of, and what I like the idea of other people thinking I’m passionate about. This is convoluted but hopefully somewhat comprehensible. 

l like the idea of getting a PhD. Even in my most academically ambitious of days, I never wanted to get a PhD in anything, let alone computer science. 9 months ago, I started considering it because 1) I was writing a thesis, 2) my peers were applying and getting into PhD programs, 3) research felt more challenging and ivory-tower prestigious than software engineering. These are not good enough reasons to subject oneself to 5+ years of academia. I’d like others to think there was some noble pursuit of knowledge driving this desire, and in ~3 conversations with my advisor there might have been, but I’m genuinely not excited about figuring out how to add more <insert portmanteau> layers to an <insert hyphenated ridiculousness> neural network to do <insert eventually, but not in the next 10 years, socially impactful task>. Please excuse the jaded tone as these thoughts have been bouncing around in my head for too long.

Over the past few days I’ve been asking myself what I really care about and the problems that I find fixable, given my (expensive, and hopefully justifiably so) knowledge and skillset. First, selfishly: I care about living abroad in my twenties. I care about getting my hands dirty and building something. I care about one day leading a team, setting the markers, and calling the shots. Next, for the world: politics and everyday life are important. It doesn’t sit right with me when there is mass incarceration of racial minorities, a lack of affordable housing and livable wages, and institutionalized discrimination in every institution especially the ones that purportedly propagate knowledge and justice, and yet there are loud voices (looking at you, tech community!) staying silent. A lot of what I have experienced in this vein has felt more conscience-appeasing (or worse, PR-appeasing) than genuine.

Based on these ruminations I’ve laid out a game plan for my procrastination coterm year. Next fall, I’m going to apply for full-time engineering jobs that target ethics and civic society. Based on a cursory search, this limits my options to Google and a couple of hyper-idealistic startups, but there aren’t better ages than 21 to do such things. I’m also going to apply to social science PhD programs (government, public policy, political science) with the goal of applying computational methods to problems in government and the developing world. Ideally, I’ll work for a year, enter into a PhD program, then figure out my life (aka choose an academia or industry job) from there.

This makes a lot of sense to me today, but maybe it won’t tomorrow. Then again, all the decisions I’ve made up to this point made a lot of sense at the time. To end this extra-long pondering on a cringeworthy note, Asians never raisin, so I still have a lot of time to figure this out.

See you in another 2 years, internet.